This morning I was lazily browsing Reddit when I came across a project by the Imperial College Robotics Society in the UK. It’s code and instructions for using the Raspberry Pi as a low-power mono FM transmitter. When I saw how easy it looked to do, I ran over to my Pi, downloaded the code, and got it running within a matter of minutes (see video above). One of the best parts about this project is that you don’t need much hardware besides the Pi itself. Just connect a 20cm piece of wire to GPIO pin 4 to act as the antenna and then you’re all set. Click on over to their wiki if you’re interested in trying it yourself and how it works. [via Reddit]

Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

Somehow I kinda doubt that this device has been type accepted for use as a transmitter by the FCC. I would seriously suggest one exercise extreme caution.

asdfg

Ah nevermind, add a 3g dongle to be able to dial in from anywhere and its the perfect low cost pirate radio transmitter. I know what my next project is!

KeithP

In the US the FCC allows unlicensed low power FM transmissions under Part 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations. The wifi/bluetooth/FM radio chip that Raspberry Pi uses passed FCC approval. So, as long as you don’t amplify your signal to broadcast more than 200 feet you should be fine.

Looking at the link that Matt provided, I wonder how difficult it would be to change the carrier to a standard unmodulated carrier wave, and use it as a morse code (aka cw for hams) transmitter. You would still need a separate receiver and you would need an small amplifier, unless you wanted to run really qrpp. This is a project that I’m excited about!